Like so many traditions this holiday season, Toys for Joys — one of the brightest, feel-good events on the LGBTQA calendar — is postponing the big gathering so there can be many more gatherings in years to come.
In other words, they’re holding off on their annual toy drive gala … but you can still get in on the feel-good part because they’ll be taking donations to make sure the toys get to thousands of underprivileged kids regardless of any pandemic.
Here’s how they’ll do it (from their latest press release):
Toys for Joys has a LOFTY goal of raising $40,000 this year to purchase toys and gifts! Obviously, we are not able to do our annual gift gala, so we have come up with other options to achieve our mission. We have heard from a few companies interested in helping us attain our goal in different ways:
Tito’s Handmade Vodka: Tito’s has pledged $10,000 to us and agrees to match dollar for dollar raised! Please help us when we launch the fundraising campaign, and help us turn this into $20,000!!
Eastern Bank: Eastern Bank has pledged $3,500 this year.
Macy’s: Macy’s has pledged $3,000 in gift cards to be given to homeless people in need as well as our teens.
Gucci: Gucci is helping us by hosting “Gucci Give Back” from Dec. 3 to 6! 10% of purchases at Boston Back Bay Gucci store during these dates will be donated back to T4J to purchase gifts and toys for the foster system and our beneficiary organizations. Just be sure to identify yourself in the store on these dates as a “Toys for Joys Supporter,” and we will be able to benefit from this as well.
Toys and Gifts: We will be purchasing our toys and gifts from Group Sales, a company that specifically serves 501c3 organizations. We purchase toys and gifts at discounted prices, and ship them directly to an address. We plan on purchasing toys and gifts and shipping them to foster service agencies as well as to our beneficiary partners that we normally help.
Gay for Good: We will be doing an abridged version of our annual tradition of wagon building! Once again, G4G will help us put together wagons. We will have a socially distanced, mask wearing small gathering of volunteers as we put together 20 wagons and distribute them again into the community for the children to use. We usually have 60, but felt that we could safely do 20 this year. G4G has been there since Day #1, and we could not do what we do without them.
Website: toys4joys.org
Let’s make this holiday season the happiest it can be for all!
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